Crumbling hopes and dreams

The title refers more to what I’m about to blog about: a fruit crumble

I don’t have any way of measuring my ingredients here for baking and cooking, which can result in some interesting experiments. This is one of them! Nathan came home yesterday with a pot of wild Strawberries picked from his folks garden and some fresh Rhubarb. He knows I like baking ( I’ve baked a batch of cookies each week since I moved in and I’ve tried my hand at making the guys meals most nights) and these ingredients conveniently fall into that hobby. My mum was round last night too for an Enchanted Broccoli Forest (it’s well good like) and she said I should have a go at making a crumble with these things. So I have.

I used-

2 Conference pears

1 Braeburn apple

Around 20-30 wild strawberries

3 and a half stalks of Rhubarb

roughly 500g of granulated white sugar (I would have used brown sugar if I had it though) 8 heaped tablespoons of that went into the fruit and the rest into the crumble topping

roughly 175g marge

roughly 250g plain flour

and 6 table spoons of water

anyone who’s made a crumble before will know it’s dead easy- make the butter/marge and flour into bread crumbs like you’re going to make pastry with it, mix in the sugar, meanwhile roast the rhubarb for 10-20 mins in the oven at around 180 (gas mark 4) and add the other fruit for 5 mins before that ends (I’m explaining this very badly) then mix it up. Put it all in a fairly deep pyrex dish (or whatever you have), add the crumble mix on top and bake it for around 30 mins, or until it’s nice and golden on top. OK so what I did towards the end was remove the juice at the bottom of the dish after I’d roasted the fruit a bit and poured it on top to mix with a bit of the crumble, just for the hell of it really. That resulted in a not so crumbly topping-

It’s more a mushy crunchy topping, but it still smells good! And it makes it look more like a cake, which is interesting. I hope it’s edible…